Last but not least, if you’re still not convinced by the alternatives you can freeze your LMDE system and avoid Update Pack 4 (thus keeping Update Pack 3 and Gnome 2), by pointing to the following repositories:

Clem,- first thank you for this amazing masterpiece that is lmde (and is only getting better with time)

- second, my question(s) here, you introduce here the gnome2-frozen repos, as i understand it is a frozen UP3 so that users can keep gnome2 as long as they want or decide for options. what is the advantage of the gnome2-frozen repo over simple just not update? in other words, is any kind of maintenance/point updates scheduled (from within the gnome2-frozen) or some specific backports planed? and also is there any EOL planned?

sorry to many questions

Edit by Clem: Hi Zerozero and many thanks for your help on testing UP4 (I love your feedback, it helped me a lot there). Gnome2-frozen is basically a copy of what latest is at the moment (aka Update Pack 3). There’s no advantage, it’s basically the same as not taking updates. There’s no backports or anything planned for it… Basically we’re moving Latest to UP4 but if it makes a few people happy it doesn’t cost us anything to make a backup copy of UP3. There’s no maintenance involved and no backports planned. We put a lot of work in MGSE, in supporting MATE and developing Cinnamon, and we held firm on LMDE until all of this was ready… this, gnome2-frozen, that’s just a little attention which doesn’t cost us any efforts and might make a difference to a few people. Eventually we’ll remove it (to claim back the pool it’s pointing to), but before doing so we’ll make an announcement, and explain how to make a copy of it (by then I doubt anyone will be interested, but again, you never know, some people might, and it doesn’t cost us anything to do it).

Last but not least, if you’re still not convinced by the alternatives you can freeze your LMDE system and avoid Update Pack 4 (thus keeping Update Pack 3 and Gnome 2), by pointing to the following repositories:

Personally, I like Cinnamon! It's very usable and looks nice without being a drastic change from Gnome 2. I anticipate that Cinnamon will eventually become the premier desktop environment for distributions far and wide! Give it a shot!